World War II was arguably the greatest conflict in modern history considering many factors, all stories, military operations and events that characterized it. The outcome of the war, in fact, continues to impact the world till this day that almost all the nations of the world prefer to live in peace than to allow anything affect the tranquility they have achieved since times after the menace. Many have even thought about how the world would look like if the war had not been fought or had Germany or Japan won the fierce and bloody contest. Many global peace analysts still take time to talk about or imagine the different direction the world would have probably gone today if Germany or Japan had won. One thing is sure anyway, the deed has been done and here we are to face the reality of its expected or unexpected result.
The way the war turned out to still remains a real surprise for many, but it obviously taught a huge and important lesson to all. Victories are most likely not determined by the numbers of battles we won, although they are ultimately a factor, however of most importance and essentiality is the fewer numbers of costly mistakes made. This is the basis for this top ten list because if those mistakes had not been made, the end product of the war might have been a different thing and we might be living in a different kind of war now.
1944 was a long time ago but it actually contributed to how our world looks like today after World War II. Most history buffs wouldn’t know the American troops had a chance to finish off Germany earlier in the war. It was a golden opportunity when they landed surprisingly at Anzio in Italy, a stone throw distance to Rome. The Germans were so taken by surprise that a few American troops even drove in Jeep all the way to Rome without hindrance to demonstrate to the world that way was opened for allied forces and that a major disaster looms for the Germans in the southern part of their nation. Out of cowardice, however, Major General John P. Lucas, the commander of the operation of the allied forces chose to consolidate his beachhead before moving to Rome and that gave the Germans enough time to mobilize their forces and contain the Americans for months. The Major General lost his job for this costly mistake and the American troops realized they would have forced the Germans back to Austria earlier than they did and many lives that were lost in the axis would have been saved.
The summer of 1940 was a hell of a time to remember in World War II history. Mussolini was prepared to restore the glory of Rome and in the bid unleashed mayhem on Albania and Greece without hesitating to push into Egypt from his colony in Libya. Mussolini’s army though oversized are inept. He had his head handed in by pushing for an alliance with British allied forces in Egypt as well British-Greek forces in Balkans. This in a way forced Hitler to give him a helping hand by sending his army to save his toothless ally but the decision ended up costing Germany really dearly because they had to ‘re-channel’ their resources and also delay their timetable for the Soviet Union conquest. This was spotted a mistake because it was believed that had Mussolini followed Franco’s lead in Spain and had Italy remained neutral, Germany may have won the war easily.
This was not actually a defeat but was considered an unnecessary distraction that had the war extended by months. General MacArthur had earlier been kicked out of Philippine two years prior to this time and he wants back in. This made him confide Roosevelt that he might lose reelection if the island chain he had so ineptly tried to defend a few years earlier is not liberated. This prompted Douglas to nullify all forces on the island including the Japanese air and naval such that the land wouldn’t be used as a base for attack launch on cities because that’s all he wanted as it is a culture to get what he wanted. It is believed by the war analysts that the needless time spent on securing the island delayed the more important invasion of Okinawa a year later and probably bought an elongation for the war. The tactics served its purpose though, MacArthur was proclaimed as returned.
France seemed to have learned nothing from World War I and so set an impenetrable line of fixed defenses on its borders with a guarantee that Germany to keep the Huns at bay. They called this the Maginot line but it is as formidable as advertised. It never extended to the coast and thus left hundred mile gap such that Germans are able to plow through them with ease in the spring. This caused the British and French Armies to be encircled in Belgium and handed France a defeat to forget. It is still unsure if the line would have stopped the Germans if it had been completed but it definitely would slow them down compared to the World War One instances. But there is every indication that once the Germans could breach it at a point, the result wouldn’t have been any different. France realized that a little late.
Hitler would show he had not learned anything from the trouncing he took at Stalingrad months earlier, he decided to launch yet another attack on the larger and well entrenched Soviet Union soldiers, this time at KURSK, which happens to be an industrial city some miles south of Moscow. Hitler had no idea he was weaving the largest land battle in history. He shook the Soviet lines but never broke them, and the battle ended up costing the Germans the best of their soldiers. They had to retreat to Berlin to limit their losses.
And General Douglas MacArthur features, here again, this time with a hare-brained scheme to defend archipelago from Japanese doom. He spent the bulk of his stockpiles of foods and resources on this mission but he had to quickly abandon the plan and pull all his resources back to Bataan Peninsula. This sure promised a bitter consequence as over 76,000 American and Filipino troops got starved and are forced to surrender in what was recorded as the greatest defeat in American military history. Douglas will sure have a way as he eventually tailed it out there before the end came. He spent the rest of the war lobbying for a Congressional Medal honor for the brilliant defense measures he used in securing the place. You know the outcome already. He would always have his way.
Hitler’s Germany nearly succeeded in his fight against communism here but he met another Waterloo as he has to fight a double-faceted battle in the USSR and USA. They simply outmuscled him in terms of manpower and industrial capacity. This saw Hitler on the defensive side after Stalingrad in 1942. The mistake now is that had he finished off, England first of all to secure the western front, he would have a full capacity to take on Soviet Union and maybe manage to avoid war with America. Maybe, we would be hearing a different history of the war and its survivors now.
The fall of France in 1940 means that England has to fight against Germany alone and this makes a sea-borne invasion of the English coast a possibility. Kudos to the Britain undersized air force- the RAF for making it impossible for the Germans to execute their plans. It was like tilting towards the German at the beginning as they were attacking the British Airfields but a small scale RAF bomber raid did the damage on them and shifted the focus to London after Fuhrer considered it the best retaliation. He simply gave the British the much needed chance to regroup and rearm with that step and they got battered and defeated. They announced the cancelation of London invasion few months later.
One wouldn’t believe how a victory could plant a seed of another defeat, this is the case with Japan. They had concentrated their efforts on a largely old battleship and lost focus in knocking out the major infrastructure on the island. Americans therefore used the Pearl Harbor as a forward base operation throughout the war. If the Japanese army had destroyed the harbor, the US military would certainly be forced to fall back to the west coast and thus will make their operations distant and difficult. Maybe it will even lead to war extension. This mistake earned them a really short-term victory and a long-term defeat in the hands of the Americans.
STALINGRAD 1942
A battle that caused one of the World Wars superpowers, Germany the war. The plan was to cease the oil-rich Caucasus region of the Soviet Union from them in the summer of 1942. But after months of brutal battle that left thousand dead and pools of blood flowing on both sides. The city was leveled and Hitler’s man on the spot, Von Paulus, the Field Marshal and his men had to surrender to save the remaining soldiers and men after they were all surrounded in 1943. Now the mistake made was that Hitler supposed to have allowed them to bow out months earlier when victory was obviously beyond their reach and avoid an unnecessary show of power. They probably would have lasted long even if they wouldn’t win the war.
DUNKIRK, 1940
Do not forget that Hitler and his men successfully encircled the combined Anglo-French army in France and Belgium in the summer of 1940. This made them capable of delivering coup d‘grace which made Hitler ordered his army a stop just miles off the victory. It was really a needless halt to show his army he was the hero of the day and not them. During this time, 300,000 British and French soldiers have evacuated to England before the noose was closed. This made it easy for them to fight back. If not for this, it would remain a doubt if English soldiers would have stood against a joint force of German and Italian in North Africa months later. This simply altered the outcome of the war and permitted the axis to take Egypt and the bountiful oil-fields of the Middle East. It really would have been game over if not for that.
